For my freshmen students who are asking for additional exercises to keep them busy on the weekend, you can download the files by clicking on some of the links. For example, these trigo function exercises can keep you occupied for some time and will help you prepare for the exams on Wednesday.

As for my graduating students in elementary, you can check out some websites for additional review materials on astronomy, the atmosphere, properties of water, hydrosphere and weather disturbances and on aquatic biomes. If you have limited access to the internet, you can give me a CD and I can burn you a copy of the presentations.

For my junior students however, since most if not all of you have immediate access to the internet, check out these sites on electricity and electric batteries. They’re good reading and review materials for the exam. Also, I urge you to look up the way Meralco bills us so you have an idea of how practical our lessons are.

Good luck!

With this unplanned surgery, we’re down again by a few more thousands. huhu! It feels like the going just keeps on getting tougher. And I’m almost out of ideas on how to get back on track to saving.

For now, the only option I could think of is selling something – like my laptop, to earn back some of what we’ve lost. The problem is what am I supposed to use in school once I dispose of it? I mean, I can’t sell it for large bucks simply because it’s almost 4-5 years old already. The highest I could go with it is probably 15-18k, which is really not enough to earn back some of the dough and provide me with enough to buy a (this time cheaper) laptop substitute at the same time. I mean, I hate to sell it like a discount furniture but that’s as high as it would sell. Especially with all the newer and cheaper units available now, it would be moronic to compete with them in terms of price.

I just wish I could think of a better solution…

After the operation this morning, my left cheek now feels like it’s twice as heavy as the right one. I can’t open my mouth as widely as before, and I still feel hungry because I’m not used to eating just porridge during meals. According to the dentist, it’s all quite normal. The swelling will persist for upto 4 days. Until then, I’m supposed to stay on a soft diet to minimize chewing and the risk of undoing the suture to my gums. After that, the inflammation will subside on its own. And once the wound has healed well enough to remove the sutures, that’s the only time I could get back to eating the way I used to.

Until then, I’m on a forced diet – a diet of porridge and other soft stuff. I guess one good thing about it is that I might be able to finally trim down a little without resulting to diet pills. Hehehe! Talk about forcing the silver lining!

Who ever said wisdom just comes with age forgot to mention one other thing – wisdom also comes with pain – a great deal of pain, especially if it’s a wisdom tooth.

You see, when I was younger, my dad used to joke around about the idea of wisdom tooth. He said it’s a physical manifestation of how much wisdom you’ve actually gained. Haha! Very funny! But even back then I knew he was just kidding. As I learned from my lessons in Developmental Biology, the tooth actually erupts and shows itself at a certain age (17 to 21), hence the term “wisdom” was coined to refer to age.

All the while I thought that the tooth erupts like any other tooth – gradual, normal-looking and painless. Both my mom and dad had no problems when they had theirs so I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about mine. Oh boy was I wrong. You see, slightly after I turned 24, my lower left wisdom tooth started to erupt. It was so painful that I had to take painkillers just to relieve the throbbing in my head. For several months, I would feel the pain occasionally. It seemed like the tooth was going to come out less gradually than I thought. Good thing I eventually got used to it.

Now 3 years after, the pain went back. This time a hundred times more painful than what I could remember. In fact, just a week ago, I couldn’t even get out of bed because of it, so I decided it’s time to finally take the tooth out. I went to the doctor and had it checked. Bad news turned worse. The pain wasn’t just because the tooth was moving. It’s because it’s moving in the wrong direction. According to the X-ray, my wisdom tooth was oriented diagonally. Its crown was now pushing against the side of my second molar. Its movement, combined with the accumulation of food in the space between it and the 2nd molar, was causing the intense pain that I was feeling. The worse thing about it was that it cannot be removed through normal extraction. It has to be surgically removed. (huhuhu!)

So now, a week later, here I am – with a swollen left cheek, a stitched-up gum, and loaded with antibiotics and painkillers. I just came from the clinic and I’m still a bit in denial of what happened. This so-called wisdom tooth just cost me a lot of pain, a surgical procedure, several absences from work already, and abstinence from basketball and all strenuous activities. Whoever said wisdom just comes with age?